Search for black cat names and every result is a list somebody assembled by feel. This one is narrower and can be checked: the names below are colour words. Ebony is a colour. Snowy is a colour. Jack is not, whatever coat the Jack you have in mind is wearing.
What the catalogue holds
Thirty-seven names in this catalogue are a colour word, spread across eight shades. Black is the largest at 10, then brown at 10 and golden at 6. White holds 5, red 5, grey 3, orange 3, and two names describe markings rather than a shade.
Nero, Negro and Noir are black in Italian, Spanish and French, and all three are in the registers. Jet, Onyx, Ebony and Coal name a black material. That is the whole mechanism: a colour name is almost always either the colour in another language or a black thing everyone can picture.
The shades are not the same size
Black has ten names and white five, which is not a fact about coats — it is a fact about vocabulary. English has more nameable black things than white ones, and the languages the registers touch supply three words for black and none for grey.
Golden names are the most used: 480 registrations each on average, ahead of red at 485 and white at 356. Sandy alone holds 1,489 and Brownie 1,754, which puts them among the most registered names on the site in any category.
What this page will not do
It will not tell you which name suits a black cat. No register behind this catalogue records what colour an animal was — the columns are name, species, sex and where it was licensed. A site that ranks names for black cats is ranking its own taste, and doing it confidently.
This catalogue held 146 colour tags of exactly that kind until recently: an early import had decided Charlie was golden and brown and Max was too. They were deleted along with 157 personality tags that said things like playful and affectionate. A name has no coat and no temperament; the animal wearing it has both, and nothing here has met your animal.
Choosing one anyway
The useful question is not which name matches a colour but whether you want the name to describe the animal at all. A colour name is a description, and descriptions date: a ginger kitten stays Ginger when its coat darkens, and a Snowy that greys is still Snowy.
Against that, they are short, concrete and easy to call \u2014 the practical virtues this catalogue can actually measure. And they age better than most jokes, because a colour is not a punchline.
What are good black pet names?
In these registers, ten names literally mean black: Nero, Blackie, Jet, Ebony, Onyx, Ash, Coal, Negro, Sable and Noir. Three of them are the word for black in Italian, Spanish and French.
Does this site suggest names by coat colour?
No. No register behind it records an animal's colour, so any such ranking would be taste presented as data. What it can show is which names are colour words.
What is the most used colour name?
Brownie at 1,754 registrations, then Sandy at 1,489 and Rusty at 1,328. Golden names average the most per name of any shade.
Why are there so few white names?
Five, against ten for black — a fact about vocabulary rather than coats. English has more nameable black things, and the languages these registers touch supply three separate words for black.
Every count on this site is a tally of real registrations: pet licences and shelter intakes published as open data by New York, Seattle, Austin, Montgomery County, Cambridge, Zurich, Basel and four Australian councils. Popularity here is the average share a name holds across those registers, so a name common in a small city is not buried by one common in a large one. Five of the eleven registers are North American and they supply 86% of the records, so read the ordering as naming in those places rather than worldwide. Browse the whole catalogue or read how the data is put together.